


Lightning and Lightsabres

by ThePorgist



Category: Reylo - Fandom, Star Wars
Genre: AchTo, F/M, Kylo Ren and Rey - Freeform, Lightning - Freeform, Pregnant, Rey - Freeform, Reylo - Freeform, Snow, Tumblr: reylofanfictionanthology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 09:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14210046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePorgist/pseuds/ThePorgist
Summary: Rey has always loved the smell of grass in the rain.Since childhood, she and Ben Solo would savour the weather; mock duelling with their light sabres, using the Force to throw mud and grass at each other and, quite recently, slow dancing in supple embrace of the rain. On hot and sunny days, Master Luke Skywalker held long and arduous lessons with their fellow padawans. It involved Rey and Ben training exceptionally hard, secretly waiting, quite impatiently, for the rain to fall.And it was on a late afternoon when Rey and Ben held their light sabres last and the rain never tasted the same again.





	Lightning and Lightsabres

**Author's Note:**

> This is a pre-Episode VII The Force Awakens short story fanfic. Will post my TFA and TLJ continuation of this pretty soon. :)  
>   
> I first posted my story in Wattpad as The Eye of His Storm right after the showing of the TFA premier and I couldn't get enough Reylo fanfics there so AO3 and Tumblr have been truly amazing.  
>   
> SO IT FEELS SO GREAT TO BE ALIVE FOR REYLO seeing how TLJ last December was all Reylo and practically had most of my story plot lines, well at least parts of the dialogue. Still, I'm crying from so much validation. 
> 
> Rian Johnson is a brilliant man who deserves to be knighted. At this point how can I not bloody ship them? A proper Episode IX should at least make them kiss or have sex and by no means redeem Ben Solo. THE PLOT THICKENS. I'M SO GLAD TO SHIP REYLO.

The brightest smile donned on Rey when the first subtle drops of rain kissed her forehead. It was as if Ben was calling her to hurry the hell up docking the new arrival X-wing star ship and get her pretty arse up their little spot on the glade.

However, it took her some time to settle in their novel acquisition. It came with BB-8, a white and orange spherical droid, who can’t seem to stop beeping and rolling around his new organic environment. In spite of her genuine interest on the quirky droid, Rey excused herself, telling BB-8 to simply trek the hill straight up and find her around the glade once he finished deploying the star ship.

And so it was on the twentieth jagged step when the rain began to become a downpour. Her white robes flapped against her lean figure. Her earth coloured hair curls spun three-sixties with the wind. Rolling thunder made Rey pause for a moment as she tried to recall the last time their remote planet experienced a thunder storm. There never was, until now.

Looking back, she wondered if the new droid would fare well in this climate. Looking forward, a packed bolt of lightning sliced sharp the salty air and sombre ground a few metres in front of her. The livid waves of the ocean were bellowing from the lightning's wake.

All of a sudden, Rey heard shrill echoes distorted by the ghostly mourn of the sea. Her heart skipped when she felt an ill disturbance to the Force. She climbed up the steep hill now madly pushing her limits. The damn star ship hangar was located on the shores of their island beach, a good drop from the Jedi Temple a hundred meters above sea level. Half-way through, Rey thought not of her erratic breathing nor of her idiotic volunteerism. 

She could sense through the Force that she may be too late.

 

Ben finally swung his light saber behind him, beheading the last two padawans who put up a desperate fight with him. He felt no remorse as he appraised the aftermath of his new wrath, unleashed. He had twelve padawans strewn on the Jedi Temple steps. They were scorched and limbless with faces forever masked with disbelief.

 

When Rey finally reached the top of the hill and ran across the glade, she halted to her worst fear glaring at the Temple entrance. The smell of grass in the rain was new to her.

She trembled violently as she kneeled and surveyed each one of her padawan brothers and sisters, freshly desecrated. She found no sign of life and the outraged rumble of thunder echoed the cacophony of her heartbeat. Rey also observed in stark horror of how the only possible weapon to make a clean sweep was a light sabre.

She drew her own in a flash. Green light illuminated her shadow against the blood stained stairs, washing away with the torrent.

She then heard the similar static singe at the threshold of the Jedi Temple above her. Like a ghostly apparition blazed by a lightning fork, Ben emerged from the tall marble pillars with a grim, black and resolute façade.

Dropping her light sabre, Rey scrambled up the stairs and wrapped her arms around Ben's neck.

‘Ben! You're alive! You're alive!’

Ben turned his light sabre off and embraced her. 

‘Rey.’ Then he whispered in decibels complemented by the hiss of the murky waves below. ‘It had to be done.’

In the midst of the havoc, she put the pieces together. As if stung, she detached herself from him.

‘No. No. No, you didn’t. You wouldn’t.’ Her heart beat was a riot that she put a hand on it and another on her gaping mouth.

However, Ben's brown eyes spoke volumes otherwise. It was a sonorous silence she would never forget. Rey's blood ran as cold as the shadowy ocean. The chilling torrent blended with her tears. She couldn't believe how he wouldn't show a smidge of guilt. She couldn't believe her beloved Ben could do this. She couldn't believe this was happening at all. As if wildly surfacing from drowning, she screamed bloody murder.

‘What have you done? Why? Why! How can you do this Ben, to our friends, to our family? You killed them all! Most of them were children!’

Ben responded by turning on his light sabre and lashing the blinding blue light through the two marble pillars beside them. While the doorway of the Jedi Temple fought with the pull of gravity and the repeating attacks of lightning on it, Ben yelled reason through the storm.

‘We've been living in a lie, Rey! A lie! The Jedi way had us thinking what the Light is with their own beliefs, with what they think the Force is telling us and with what they think is truth! And they’ve never told us why!’

Rey immediately reached for her light sabre through the Force and held it in defence.

‘What are you on about? The Jedi’s have been nothing but good to us, leading us to the Light.’

Ben swung his light sabre in tasteless abandon. But Rey was swift to parry the onslaught while holding her ground on the bloody temple steps.

‘Good to us? If the Jedi were good to us, they would tell us the truth!’

‘What truth?’

‘The truth that someone else could be greater than them, that someone else should not be limited with what he could do with the Force!’

Crushing the site of the massacre, the fallen Temple crumbled and grumbled behind them. The unlikely pair was reaching the middle of the glade, open to the impulsive piercing of the lightning. 

Ben made to swing at Rey's head and legs but she side-stepped, skipped lightly and coiled to attack with all the flowing grace and speed of a star ship in hyperspace.

‘So you think this is greatness, Ben? Slaughtering everyone to call you great?’

Ben dodged and promptly returned Rey's own moves with fuming alacrity and the vehemence of a comet. The slam of the now taller ocean waves below were in league with their light sabres static collisions.

'Shut it! I'm capable of greater and worse things and you know it! I am so sick of them! I am so sick of stopping when I know I can!'

'You don’t understand what Master Luke is doing, do you? He's helping you do something else greater!'

'Bullshit! You don't understand! Jedi’s are extinguishing whatever Light of the Force I'm capable of. You call that helping? I call it a betrayal to the Force!'

'So you would have this 'greatness' of yours prosper at the expense of your own family? Your bloody own! You are disgracing Sir Han and Princess Leia! You're better than this Ben or you're no better than Darth Vader!'

'How dare you shame my grandfather? He chose justice when my parents and uncle wouldn't! Anakin chose order in the mayhem of the galaxy!'

Despite the almost zero visibility in the shower of rain that night, Ben was able to slice her deeply across her abdomen and bruise her shin and arms. But this pain was nothing to her crying heart. She and Ben have long trained together, never knowing it would lead to this point.

Rey had had enough of this. She poured all her frustration and years of pent up feelings in one final Force driven blow. The powerful clash of blue and green was a spectacle, sending shock waves reverberating beyond the Jedi Island and the seas. They were even heard and felt by poor BB-8, drenched far below in the inundated star craft hangar. 

The incredible bash resulted with the two having space for a breather. Light sabres hung loosely from their numb grips. They realized in a weary haze that they've reached the cliff with Rey three feet from the tapering edge. They could smell and hear the salty sea's massive waves reaching for them.

Clutching her split and singed abdomen, Rey refocused her eyesight through the torrent. She saw how her earlier offenses caused thick blood to ooze down Ben's short black locks to his pallid wild face. She also noticed how his every move seemed to waylay his point.

'Why won't you kill me, Ben? You know very well how to. You're free from yourself and your family. You're free from the Jedi Order and Skywalker. Now you've freed yourself from the Light. So why won't you kill me and end your misery?'

As if adjusting to Ben's mood, the once harsh rain suddenly subdued to a thin shower. 'I can't. I would never.'

'You would never what, Ben?'

'I could never—'

'You could never hurt me but you would kill our family? The entire galaxy? Just for what, Ben? What would you gain with death? What would you gain with greatness in eternal misery? What aren't you bloody telling me?'

‘I can’t hurt you! I love you, damn it!’

‘That’s a pathetic excuse!’

‘Just shut it, Rey!’

‘I don’t understand! You will have everything destroyed just for my love? Is that it? What is this truly about, Ben? Tell me!’

Rey shouted and thus made Ben scream their greatest flaw.

‘I’m broken! I’m worthless! I’m one sod mess! And I love you! I have always loved you Rey! But the bloody Jedi code forbids it. Forbids us! Forbids anything of love when the cause of the Jedi is grounded with it. And that is the most pathetic bullshit.’

He surprisingly rendered her silent, but the loud thunder was harmonizing with her heartbeat. Ben continued in a gentle voice like the rain caressing them.

‘When we danced here every night in the rain, I once asked you if you would love a monster. And you told me with a laugh that I was one already, but with a kiss, you said you'd learn to love me just the same. I'm still clinging to the hope you'd still say it too when I say this.’

Ben turned off his light sabre and told her his revelation whilst lightning bolts stabbed around them.

‘I have been conversing with Snoke through the Force and I’ve been learning a lot about the fallen Empire and the new First Order. Under their paradigm, I am free to use and develop the Force in me. And with that much impact,’ Ben glanced at the Jedi Temple and padawan wreckage, ‘I've realized how much I've been missing as a Jedi. Now I've learned that anger fuels all things and that fear means freedom. I was enlightened in the dark and I was empowered to become a Sith Lord, to finish what grandfather started.’

After a lengthy thunder filled pause, he distinguished the tears trickling down Rey's face from the soft rain. He tried to fight the guilt seeing her hand clasping her large wound, as if preventing the contents of her stomach to spill. Her once white robes were now dyed burgundy red. Inhaling sharply, like a deep breath before the plunge, Ben outstretched his palm to hers with eyes full of resolve and promise.

‘Snoke seemed pleased with our Force bond and guaranteed me that I could take you with me as a life-long partner in the Dark Side. There we can truly be together. No restraints. No silly codes. No more waiting for the rain. I’ve finally found a way for us. I will spend my life to give you the entire galaxy and more, if you will be by my side. Rey, come with me, be mine and be my wife in this fight.’

Her silence was deafening, something Ben was sure he had to anticipate, so he had to try anything or everything.

‘Snoke took great interest in you as well, especially sensing how incredibly strong the Force is with you. He’ll help us, Rey, else miss the truth of our existence. The truth of the Force. Come away with me!’

After the long reticence, Rey shook her head. The rain overhead returned now with snowflakes and the wind, chilling them both to the core.

‘No. You are missing the truth, Ben. You've been seduced by the Dark Side. You've been blinded of what a real Jedi Knight cherishes and what it is like to be grateful, content and hopeful.’ Rey inhaled with a sob, ‘Also, you've forgotten your promise after I told you that I'd learn to love you even if you're a monster. You vowed you'd never become one, for me or for us. You're not Ben. The man I used to love would never break his promise and would never offer me the galaxy just to be happy. You're no Ben at all.’

Ben shuddered at her words and the pouring snowflakes. He accepted the fear coursing through his veins. He turned on and raised his light sabre in the air, attempting to regain some ground.

‘You're right. I am no Ben. He no longer exists. Snoke has baptized me as Kylo Ren, his new Apprentice, Sith Lord, commander of the First Order fleets and Master of the Knights of Ren.’

Rey reached quickly for her light sabre, but both parties made no move to attack. He stepped closer with only a foot of drenched grass separating them. He then asked in fragile apprehension.

‘Rey, will you not learn to love me now? As you promised.’

She fought her sobs and stood her ground. Through the curtain of her wet dark brown hair studded with snow, Rey whispered through the icy wind and the vibrating static hum of their light sabres.

‘No. Not like this. Never like this.’

With uneven breaths and steady streams of tears, Ren struggled with the freezing, searing and choking pain in his already shattered heart. He opened his mouth to pathetically try again, but suddenly noticed how the thickening snow and her gleaming tenacity shrouded a similar countenance. His thoughts ran to a million possibilities.

‘Tell me Rey, what aren't _you_ telling me? Are you afraid of the Dark Side? Are you afraid of me? To be with me? Or are you,’ Kylo’s eyes caught her hand on her stomach again. He hesitated in a startled whisper, ‘Are you _with child_?’

She looked up at the frightful skies, seeing a leviathan First Order star ship approaching and an enormous bolt of lightning forming over their heads. Then Rey met his once warm brown eyes with hers and smiled eerily. Permanently piercing his heart, she quietly breathed her last words to him.

‘You don't need to know.’

At the same time, the fiercest lightning made touchdown with both of their light sabres, throwing them far, far apart in a brutal blast fission of white, blue and green light energy.

 

Kylo Ren fought his unconsciousness in shallow breaths. His eyesight was a blur. The ringing and burning electricity surged throughout his defeated body. And during this horrible battle, it was Rey who brought him out of his ordeal. He felt her fondly kissing away all the pain. They were sweet and sublime until he realized her kisses were snowflakes.

In spite of his delightful reprieve, Kylo found himself awfully weary and shaking as he regained his bearings. He was splayed on his and Rey's favourite spot on the glade, near the ruins of the Jedi Temple. He saw his blue light sabre beside him, gravely melted, and he hoped he received the major brunt of the violent lightning. He suddenly recalled that Rey was thrown away too, but over the edge, over the sheer drop to the perilous sea.

Kylo staggered wildly to the edge of the hill where he last saw her. He gazed in stark terror at a dimming and finally extinguishing green light sabre sinking in the harsh dark sea, but no Rey. He slumped on his frail knees, hysterically screaming his deepest and severest anguish to the snow and thunder.

 

Just as he made way to the stairs of the hill in hopes of finding even her lifeless body carrying his possible innocent child, Kylo Ren was pulled away by a squad of stormtroopers. He could hardly understand what they were saying as he let them escort him to the star ship. He was deliriously exhausted to fight back or use the Force, so he yelled for them to save her.

He saw from the closing door of the First Order star ship, a towering silver stormtrooper peering over the cliff. This odd storm trooper returned quickly to the ship, shaking her head at the person behind him. Kylo turned around and glared at a black clad man with calculating green eyes and a cunning snarl. With blithe indifference, this authority figure addressed Kylo as the ship ascended the gloomy skies.

‘Captain Phasma deems it a lost cause, Lord Ren. This wretched storm made sure of it.’

This leader motioned for a storm trooper to hand over a black box. He changed to a sinister tone, matching the thunder vibrating the ship.

‘I am General Hux, my Lord, and on behalf of our Supreme Leader Snoke and the rest of our corps, I welcome you finally to the Dark Side.’

Stormtroopers around them saluted the new Sith Lord as General Hux presented Kylo with the finished black light sabre Kylo made nestled in the black box. Kylo took the light sabre and turned it on. It was in an ominous red, furnished on a similar glowing cross guard.

He had constantly thought and extensively prepared for this very event, but nothing would ever compare with the turbulent black storm in him, slaughtering his hollow and paper-thin heart. He felt so numb that he could hardly find anything to affirm him. So he barked for everyone to leave him alone on the star ship's dock door. The First Order dutifully left with General Hux spitefully informing him to come right after to the Control Headquarters with the Supreme Leader.

Alone with his thoughts, Kylo Ren dropped his new light sabre and knelt once again in total abandon. He could feel the snowflakes on him melting. He could smell his singed and soaked black robes stained with grass, blood and mud. All were chilling him in a relentless smother as he recalled.

The smell of the grass after the rain will forever haunt him.

 

Without telling the General, Captain Phasma saw an X-Wing Fighter earlier. It flew stealthily through the grey skies in a wink. Indeed, it was a troublesome chase. And she was simply following executive orders.

 

A sopping BB-8 beeped frantically as he tried to accelerate their already extreme travel in light speed. To no avail, he commanded the X-Wing star ship on auto-pilot. This droid rolled his spherical self to a terribly battered patient. Rey was burned yet freezing wet on a pool of her blood dripping like a faucet. This bothered BB-8 tremendously. In terms of medicine, BB-8 only had the skill to repair any kind of machine. So he could only think of one thing he last saw from his previous owner. He positioned underneath Rey's broken arm and slid his dome head on her blood stained chest. Rey groaned in her fatigue.

‘Beebee-ate? Thank you.’ She murmured breathlessly.

BB-8 was pleased that the mechanical cuddle worked. He beeped worriedly, informing her that he planned to seek aid for her from his former master, a pilot. Rey nodded and slowly lost consciousness. She saw last the coordinates of their destination on the cockpit's blinking console.

Jakku.


End file.
